


so tell me why my gods look like you

by emindomita



Category: Booksmart (2019)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Eventual Romance, Eventual Smut, F/F, Friendzone, Gay, LGBTQ Character, LGBTQ Themes, Olivia Wilde - Freeform, Sapphic, amyxhope, diane silvers, hopexamy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-14
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:32:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26462707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emindomita/pseuds/emindomita
Summary: A year after high school is over, Hope and Amy live in New York. They see each other again. Hope is lonely. Amy isn't.
Relationships: Amy/Hope (Booksmart)
Comments: 14
Kudos: 52





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> First time writing in English but for audience purposes, I feel like it's better this way. I loved booksmart and I feel like saphics deserve to know what happened to the best couple in the film. Please bare with me and let me know what you think.

Hope got off the bus at Port Authority thanking who knows who for not being in Los Angeles anymore. She had barely been able to afford that last ticket to New York after spending all her savings in not one but two backpacking adventures. But thanks to her mom, she had been able to make ends meet and finally move to her cousin’s in Upper Manhattan. New York had been her dream for as long as she could have remembered and starting college there after a gap year seemed like a great idea. But just like a school sweetheart who might become an endgame after growing up, she knew she had to try other things before settling down for good in her dream city.   
After grabbing her luggage from the bus compartiment, she walked down the aisle and left the platform. A boy who had flirted with her during the last part of the trip caught up with her after long steps. Hope had almost paid no attention to him at all during the ride. He had tried to make conversation a bunch of times and at one pint it was just painful to witness so many mediocre attempts to make himself look interesting. Being too aware of not coming off too strong but also trying to be assertive, he had made a mess with words and side smiles. At some point, she just felt pity for him and uttered a few sounds to put him out of his misery. Mistake. He had gained courage and had been talking non stop for the last hour of the bus ride. 

“Hey, so… it was nice meeting you” he said in between sighs as he tried to catch his breath. “I was wondering if… you know, if you are new in town like me, we could… hang out, maybe. If that’s ok.”

Hope stopped, looked at him and side-smiled. 

“I was being polite with you, kiddo. Not gonna happen.” The boy’s face stiffened. “But had fun watching you try.” 

The boy’s grin disappeared and he frowned as if too much had changed in the last three seconds from the picture perfect romanticky scene he had pictured in his air-filled head. Hope walked away, not even thinking about the guy and trying to focus on which aisles she should turn right or left. The boy just stood there. Or at least she thought. She didn’t bother looking back. Boys were such a waste of time. She was pretty, she knew that. All her life, her parents had told her so. Her older brothers had told her so. Her grandma on occasion when she visited LA from Connecticut had told her so. The football team in high school had acted around her so. And senior students and their cheerleader friends had hated her so. She kind of liked the attention at first, but after turning sixteen she grew tired of the compliments on her strawberry lips, her round eyes and her Julia-Roberts-sharp-but-sexy chin. She was not one to care about looks or fashions. She didn’t buy the latest trends or read Teen Vogue magazine. She didn’t date boys from school. Her friend Annabelle barely asked her about the boys she liked at first. Then she realized she should ask about girls, but Hope was so private that even though that became the right question, Annabelle knew she wouldn’t get an answer either. Hope marched to the beat of her own drum and not many people understood that. If they didn’t, she didn’t care. Nothing really mattered to her in terms of acceptance. That she could blame it on the way she looked. Being plain and beautiful seemed less fun for her than being beautiful and mysterious. She liked the latter a lot more. The less people got her, the more she felt like clinging to her books and her scribbles on the school’s textbooks margins. She liked writing. It had helped her built a small universe on her own to run away from stupid comments based on appereance and shaped by Victoria’s Secret TV commercials where some models looked like an older, richer, more obnoxious version of herself. At some point during high school, she decided not to care and so she didn’t. She had made only one good friend there who kind of got her enough to share meaningful conversations and so she didn’t need much else. 

Now, she was in NYC to finally start over. Travelling through Europe for four months after school had changed her life. She had come back to L.A to get a crappy job and earn some more money and leave L.A again, this time to see America. Being at home with her mom, alone the two of them, having dinner silently while watching prime time news kind of made her feel interested in local politics. Before uttering big opinions, she felt like she needed to know her country a bit more before becoming much more vocal. She had dubbed her new goal of seeing America as her discovery trip to master the art of empathy. She did it in two months and decided to go back home again, get another crappy job, this time selling screwdrivers and hammers to old men at a small business, earn some more money and write about what she had seen in the last couple of weeks. She had chronicled all her backpacking and the articles that resulted from that earned her a very small column at a local news website. The interest in it grew enough in her community to start getting a few dollars per column and before she knew it she had enough money to move to New York and keep writing. Journalism wasn’t her thing, really. She dreamed of becoming a fiction writer. But as she grew lonelier as Annabelle stayed in college and most of her classmates left town, the idea of undergrad education in something like English or Creative writing became more appealing to her. She became determined to get into NYU and maybe pursue their masters in creative writing once she got her English major. She had heard great things about it. She convinced herself NYU was the best place to go and that nothing else, not even the people who were going to be in New York, had anything to do with her choice. In the meantime, she would live with her cousin, her cousin’s husband and their little three-year-old, Florence. 

There the cousin was, Gina, waiting for her at a filthy coffee table not far from Port Authority’s entrance. She smiled big when she saw Hope walk towards her. Gina stood up and hugged her dearly. She was her mom’s older sister's only child and had always had a protective big-sister relationship with Hope. She was the first person Hope had come out with and had guided her through troubling times in her earliest experiences as a queer young girl from a broken home during high school.   
“You keep growing up,” she said. “I don’t care if you are twenty, you do”. 

“Get out”. 

Hope pushed her away jokingly. She was glad she had someone like her to count on. Her two older brothers moved away before she turned thirteen and could even dig deeper into what the three of them might have in common. Now they had families on their own and had forgotten about the one prior. Hope looked at Gina and noticed a few wrinkles and tired eyes, but she knew their bond was still the same. Without saying much else, they jumped inside a cab and made their way uptown. 

“Excited?” Gina asked as Hope looked outside the car window. 

“Yeah…” she murmured.” A bit scared, to be honest.” 

“Oh… you? Scared? Nah, don’t think so.” 

Hope had dreamed of New York for so long, she barely remembered anything else that happened prior. And a lot of stuff had happened. Gina had taken a home office day to welcome her into the house and help her get settled. She and her husband Mick had a nice cozy apartment in Manhattan Valley, right next to the Upper East Side. Mick had a good job as a lawyer but was still trying to hay his law school debt. Gina worked as a freelance graphic designer and was in the middle of grad school when she got pregnant. Her thesis, still pending, rested in a forgotten file in her Mac. Little Florence had taken much of their time ever since being born and Gine split her time between designing posters, pocket-sized books and bottle labels and raising her baby. Gina had improvised a bedroom in the attic that had been used mostly as dead storage space before. But Hope liked it when she saw it. The ladder dropped down from the ceiling and she couldn’t stand all the way up with her head hitting the top, but her cousin had made an effort to move all the boxes to the furthest corner of the room and had improvised a comfy bed which consisted on a queen size mattress right under a dusty skylight. When Hope saw it, she made a mental note to clean it up so she could see New York’s sky. She also imagined that a few indoor plants would remind her of her old room, the one place in L.A where she felt safe. A few pictures taken with her analogic camera would also make her feel okay. She also noticed a pile of stuffed cushions and a little desk where Gina assumed she’d feel comfortable writing. She envisioned a tower of books, the one she had in mind buying, stacking up against the wall. 

“Did you like your room?” 

A little spark lit up in her cousin’s eyes. Hope could tell she had put effort on it. 

“I did, thank you so much” she replied with a smile. ”But I don’t want to take much space here. As soon as school begins and I get a decent job, I’ll stop bothering the three of you.” 

“Are you kidding?” Gina retorted. ”Florence will be thrilled when she gets back from school and you know Mick loves you too.”

Hope did feel a bit like a burden though. She wished she could start school right away but there were three weeks left still and she hadn’t been able to secure a dorm nearer school. She still dreamed of getting her own apartment near Washington Square Park. Her absent look was caught by her cousin. 

“Don’t you have friends in town to see? It could be good for you to talk to them as well.” 

The question pinched Hope in her stomach. She had tried her hardest not to think about Amy beginning school in a few weeks, like herself. She promised herself and Annabelle as well -cause she made her to, let’s be honest- that she wouldn’t contact her. Annabelle was now best friends with Molly in Yale and Molly had told her that Amy had met someone. Another girl. 

Okay, so the truth is, Hope blamed herself for this. After Nick’s party and graduation, Amy had left for Botswana and they had kept in touch for a bit. At first, they talked like friends but as time went by, Hope had slipped the fact that they could sext for fun. It was silly and innocent at first, but then it kind of gave them an intimacy they weren’t expecting. Amy was clumsy in person, but she was so articulate with words that got the hang of it easily. Hope longed to see her and Amy did as well. When Hope came back from Europe and started working her butt off to earn more money, Amy expected she’d come visit her in Africa. Hope knew that the money would help her pay her trip and her chronicles as well as minor bills if she eventually could get into college. Hope thought that she had let Amy down a bit. She never said anything about it, but their relationship started to fade away. Before Hope had time to process, Molly told Annabelle that Amy started dating this girl from the States that had been volunteering in the same program, but at a different town in Botswana. This came in as a bucket of ice cold water. She didn’t text Amy back and never asked. Her pride and her remorse grew stronger in her, but just like everything else, she swallowed it all in waiting for them to go away. They never did.   
“I guess I could call George” Hope whispered absent-mindly, with her eyes fixated on the kitchen counter and still caught up remembering Amy’s text messages. “He’s starting his second year at Tisch this fall.”

“Is he in NYC for the summer?”

“Well, he posted on Insta he’s an understudy for this off-Broadway show so I guess he is…” 

“Nice, I’m sure he’d love it if you go see him” 

George had said yes right away. Yes, we need to catch up. Yes, you need to know all the amazing things that have happened to me ever since I put my foot in New York. So, after Hope texted him and asked if they could meet, he said that he would be covering one of his castmates after he got food poisoning the following Friday. He also mentioned that this was the first time he had the chance to go on-stage on the show and that all his friends were coming to see him. Hope got excited. The prospect of seeing one familiar face her age had more attraction than she had originally expected. The said Friday came and she put together a cute little outfit to go and boost her self-esteem a bit. In a million years she’d admit it, but she felt nice after prepping a bit to see his former classmate. Her morale had gone down the hill after Amy had moved on faster than expected and sometimes some acts are not desired but necessary to make oneself feel better. She put on a pair of high waisted jeans that made her butt look fierce and her legs endless, a strapless black tank top that revealed her ribcage if she stretched her arms too high, golden earrings and a bunch of little golden necklaces that made her look like a spanish model. She chose flats. She hated being noticed due to her height. She also painted her lips in a shy red tone and added just enough highlighter to look a bit more elegant, but make up wasn’t her strong suit at all. 

“Looking good, Kate Moss” Mick teased from the kitchen as Hope clumsily walked down the drop down ladder from the attic. 

Gina hit him with a kitchen towel. Little Florence ran towards Hope before she could open the door and clinged to her legs. 

“I’ll be back before you know it,” Hope told her, while caressing her curly short hair. 

“I want my night night story” she sobbed. 

“I’ll make two stories for you tomorrow night to make up for tonight.”

Florence opened up her eyes with happiness and surprise. 

“She can’t possibly be making up stories for you all the time, darling” Gina warned her daughter from afar. 

“Yes, she can,” Mitt claimed. “Especially if that lets us sleep at night, honey.”

Hope knelt before her niece and kissed her goodbye. 

“You got money, Hope, right?” Gina asked Hope as she was crossing the door.

Hope raised her hand before leaving and gave her the okay sign. She walked out of the building and got in the subway. This stupid habit had grown in her and that was that everytime she hit the subway, she’d look for Amy in stranger’s faces. She knew Columbia wasn’t far from Gina’s apartment. Chances were not that difficult. 

George’s play was downtown. She rode for about forty minutes until she reached her destination. She was fifteen minutes early. Hope lit a cigarette while waiting for the doors to open. The entrance was stained with dry beer but the small marquee shone with color lights and a beautiful drag queen stood right by the door, with her nails amazingly curated and a marvellous violet wig. She smiled at Hope from afar. Hope kept taking puffs at her cigarette while her eyes became fixated of a female figure walking quirkily from the opposite corner. Her mind wandered. The person strut down the street vibrantly talking with her companion, what seemed like another woman. The former was gesticulating awkwardly with her hands as if she was explaining something. Their conversation was vivid and as they came closer, their bodies and their face features became clearer. The said woman, who was not a woman but rather a girl, was wearing an oversize jean jacket over a plain white tank top and tight leather pants. Hope recognized the sneakers. She had seen those sneakers every day during her high school years. The girl whose voice suddenly became silent also had long bright red hair and a face full of freckles.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here it starts to get a bit interesting.

“Uh... hi” Amy’s face went pale. She hadn’t seen Hope in over a year but somehow, inexplicably, she felt like it had been only seconds since they parted lips. It was as if she could just feel the weight of her body pressing against her. 

“Hi” Hope smiled. 

That gesture on Hope’s face was the hardest muscular exercise she had done in her life. And she had done rock cycling. Please, Hope, she thought to herself, please, use all that practice you did through high school and please look and act as careless as a breeze. 

“Hi” Amy repeated. 

“Hi” the girl next to Amy also replied. 

Hope hadn’t really noticed her. She had small white teeth and a round face with asian features. Her hair was short and curly and she was beautiful. 

“This is Daisy,” Amy introduced her without taking her eyes off of Hope “she’s… she’s my…”  
“I’m her girlfriend” Daisy completed the sentence casually and waved at Hope. 

“Hi, Daisy” Hope said with a plain dry unreadable expression on her eyes. 

She hadn’t stopped smiling, but her face was kind of straight. She didn’t want to be a bitch, she didn’t want to make them feel uncomfortable either. But she couldn’t help but look at the other girl with envy disguised as distance. 

“Did you...uhm… come just to see George?” Amy asked. She was rubbing her hands nervously, her back was sort of arched inwards as if she was becoming a small little girl right before Hope’s eyes. She also looked away. Hope didn’t. “Or are you in New York for a long time?”

“Just came to see George” Hope replied, without saying anything else. “I’m leaving Monday.” 

She didn’t really think that through, she wasn’t sure why she was lying. It felt like a self-defense automatic reply. If the two of them were alone in that big city during their freshman year, they might confuse their physical and geographical closeness for an emotional nearness that Hope wasn’t sure she could handle. Especially if Amy had a girlfriend now. 

The people summoned at the small teathre’s entrance started walking inside. 

“Gather round, people!” the woman at the entrance said, raising one hand. “It’s showtime!”   
Suddenly, two girls crossing frantically the street started shouting from the other sidewalk. 

“Not without us, biatch!”

Amy and Hope turned around. Dear Lord, that was Molly Davidson running as if there was no tomorrow, followed by the tiny slender figure of Annabelle. 

“What the fuck?” Hope whispered to herself. 

“D’you really think that we were going to miss the opportunity to shout at George from an audience? Did you really?” Molly said, catching her breath, bending backwards, palms on her knees. She stood up and walked right towards Amy in small jumps. “Sorry, bitches, this LADY HAS TAKEN ALL MY BREATH AWAY, DAMN.” 

She snapped her fingers in the air. 

“You, my dearest Molly Davidson, look as if God had just freed one of his angels and sent them straight down to Earth” Amy replied with a pouty mouth and a look filled with so much sass Hope just had to smirk a bit. Damn that cute nerd. 

The four of them plus the Daisy girl, standing outside George’s play, was an image that Hope wouldn’t have guessed in a million years. She suddenly felt less lonely. Not that she minded feeling that way, ever, but it was nice to see familiar faces. 

“How on Earth…?” Hope looked at Annabelle in disbelief. “You, bitch”

“Surprise, asshole” her friend smiled. 

“George wouldn’t shut up about this when the three of us met in L.A back at the beginning of the summer, so we had to make sure he wasn’t lying about this sudden strike of fortune.” Molly recalled. “And it was better if this was surprise.”

Amy looked at Hope searching for answers. Hope shrugged.

“Molly actually made me not tell you cause she thought you might not show up” Annabelle confessed to Hope and she didn’t blame the two of them. Had she known, she probably wouldn’t have gone and would have insisted Triple A they met alone instead. 

“Anyway, we should get going, right?” Molly said, pointing at the drag queen at the door who was putting her hands on her waist and giving them a bad look. 

“That was quite a scene” she shouted at them “but I have more drama inside the theatre.” 

All of them walked towards the theatre in line and very quickly. Molly was the first one to go in, followed by Annabelle and Daisy who was guiding Amy inside as well by the hand. Hope followed them at the end of the line. She was putting out a cigarette before having to go inside.   
“It’s...uhm… it’s nice to see you, Hope” Amy said in a very low voice as her girlfriend was leading her into the theatre and had a split second to look back. 

“Careful, nerd, you might walk into a wall if you don’t look ahead” she replied trying to hide the bitterness. “But it’s nice of you to say and it’s nice to see you too.” 

The play was… interesting, to say the least. It was an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet but instead it was re-interpreted in the eighties during the AIDS health crisis and the characters were all male and gay. Of course, had it had more budget and a decent casting direction it could’ve been better. But it was cringy and painful to watch. George played the character who might have been Mercutio. His modern name was Mark and had a weird lisp which Hope was sure that had been George’s idea to make the character stand out more among the his castmates. She could’ve easily slept through the play, but a ball grew bigger and bigger in her stomach everytime she noticed Daisy drawing small circles on Amy’s arm or caressing her knee or grabbing her hand randomly. She kind of wished she could do that, so easily and without any care at all, meaning their relationship would’ve gone all the necessary phases so that they would have no trouble in showing their affection in public and, more importantly, in front of their friends. 

The show was done after seventy inexplicably long minutes. The lights were turned on and they were all able to look at each other’s faces. Molly had obviously fallen asleep and a thread of saliva had left the corner of her mouth, leaving a line of dry spit. Annabella had cried during the last scene and was wiping her tears carefully so that no one else would notice. Hope just yawned. After leaving, they decided they would wait for George outside. 

“I’ll go get cigarettes,” Hope told Annabelle as they left the theatre.

“I’ll join you” 

They walked down the street to a nearby Seven Eleven while the others waited for George. It felt nice to have Annabella back. Hope liked it when they spent time together not saying much at all but still aware of the possibility that if they wanted to, they could tell anything to each other. 

“Just ignore her” Annabelle finally said. 

“What?”

“Daisy, just ignore her. She’ll be back in Madison before you know it and Amy will realize she belongs with you” 

Hope laughed bitterly. Idiotic romantic ideas were not her cup of tea. 

“First off, I am not sure that’s correct. Secondly, when did you become a romantic loser? You are spending way too much time with Davidson.” 

Annabelle didn’t say anything, she just rolled her eyes. 

“I saw you crying at the end of the play” Hope continued. “And it was a shitty play.”

“Could you just drop the sarcasm and own your shit?” her friend said abruptly. “It’s clear you can’t stand the fact that she’s with someone else.” 

“We just made out in high school, A.” Hope reminded her. “Once. At a party. We were both drunk.”

“Yeah and then you sexted and then she had all these ideas of you going to visit her.”

“Did she, really? Did Molly tell you that?” 

Annabelle shook her head. 

“No but Molly mentioned she had a crush on you. Big time. And that she was sad when you guys drifted apart.” 

Hope’s heart shrunk at the image of lonely Amy in her little bed back in Botswana, wondering why she wouldn’t visit. 

“I think I fucked up, then” Hope confessed. “I lied, I told her I would go back to L.A on Monday. She specifically asked if I would be staying in NYC.” 

“Why did you lie?” Annabelle was surprised. 

It was not like Hope to not own her shit and lie about it. The Daisy situation had clearly gotten to her head and made her lose her feet. She was not being herself. She needed to get it back together as soon as possible. 

“I don’t know,” Hope said, giving in. “I just don’t want to see her cause if I do and I can’t be with her then… I’d have to pretend that being friends is ok and it’s not.” 

“Well” her friend sighed after a long pause while they were getting back to the others “you did fuck up cause Molly already told Amy you were accepted at NYU and that you are crashing at your cousin’s near Columbia for a while.” 

Damn it. They returned to their friends and as they walked back, Hope could see Amy turning around before any of the others and stared at them while they approached them. George had just come out of the theatre and was at the center of the round, joyfully recalling everything that had gone down inside. 

“... and I just had to go onstage and the damn zip wouldn’t go up and the costume guy was like, Georgie, this is not gonna work, you need to take the shirt off and just not wear a shirt during the last act…”

He stopped at the glance of Triple A and Hope appearing behind the crowd. 

“Well, if it’s the other city girl, right?” he yelled and took Hope by her arm. He pushed her towards him as he did the same to Amy who was on his left. “We are the Dixie Chicks of New York City, we’ll have so-much-fun this year. Oh my God, I have so much planned.” 

Hope smiled awkwardly and could feel Amy’s eyes directed right at her. 

“You know, Alan has prepared this wonderful dinner back home cause we knew that you guys would be coming. We can head over there, have a couple of drinks, maybe go out afterwards… what do you say?” 

“Why isn’t Alan here?” Molly asked. 

“He’s a drama queen and he can’t take not being the center of attention” George answered, “but, anyway… what do you say?”

“Let’s do it” Annabelle accepted. 

“I’m in” Hope said, without much thinking. She looked at Amy who looked at her girlfriend. That hurt. 

“Yeah, Ames?” Molly agreed as well. 

Amy looked at Daisy over the corner of her eye. The girl looked at the floor. 

“It’s just that Daisy has a very early flight tomorrow at six and…”

“Right, you want to spend your last night scissoring away, I get it” George remarked. 

Hope’s stomach shrunk and her throat narrowed. 

Daisy whispered something to Amy’s ear along the lines of “Just go… it’s okay… they are your friends and you haven’t seen them in a while.” 

Amy looked at Daisy’s eyes for approval. It was all just too painful to watch for Hope. She tightened her teeth. 

“I’ll be back to take you to the airport, I promise” Amy told her and kissed her on the cheek. 

Hope looked away. She could see Anabelle and Molly noticing her lips violently pressed against each other. Daisy waved goodbye and Amy helped her hail a cab. Once she left, all of them started walking to George’s place which was not far away. George was going on a rant about the play, obviously, while Annabelle listened closely. Amy and Molly were right behind them, catching up and laughing purely while Hope followed them with a hand tucked in her pocket and the other one holding one of the cigarettes she had just bought. She could see Amy glancing at her from time to time over the corner of her left eye. Hope was hopeless. She had just witnessed Amy behave like a grown up who had been in a steady romantic relationship for a while. She hailed a cab like a pro for her girlfriend, walked her towards it and kissed her goodbye. She reminded Daisy to let her know when she got home safe and was going to drive her to the airport the next morning. Somehow, she wished it was her. And she also wished they hadn’t stopped talking. She wished she had had the guts to confront her a while back and ask her if she was mad she didn’t go visit in spite of having the money. She wished she hadn’t lied about living in New York. She also wished she had never texted George and agreed to go see him. 

A few feet ahead of her, Amy kind of slowed down her pace and Hope caught up at her speed. Molly had sped up and was talking about Shakespeare’s take on romantic relationships and how those could not be converted into twentieth century queer romance. Hope would have a lot to say about that comment and she would’ve spoken her mind, hadn’t Amy try to strike up a conversation. 

“Hey” she said. 

“Hey.” 

“So New York, huh?”

Damn it, she’s starting off from the worst place. 

“Awesome, right?”

“Yeah, why did you lie?”

Amy’s abruptness caught her off guard. She wasn’t expecting her to ask her right away in that harsh inquisitive voice tone. 

“It’s not easy to see you after a year with a girlfriend, you know?” Hope hinted. “It’s not an excuse but it’s just not my ideal scenario.” 

“Well, I didn’t take you for a liar before today” Amy painfully added. 

“I didn’t take you for a grown up in a committed relationship but I guess we are all in different places now, aren’t we?” 

That stupid remark made Hope look even more stupid and immature. Who was she? She wanted to leave and pretend she hadn’t seen none of that cheesy love display between Amy and her new girlfriend. 

“Look, I’m sorry for lying,” she finally said. “It’s weird that we’ll both be here for a while and I didn’t want to force this into a friendship or anything like that just because we’ll be alone and because we’ve known each other for years.” 

“If I hung out with you cause we live here, it would be because I like you and we could be friends” Amy said, sure of herself. 

“We can’t be friends, Amy.”

“Why not?” she asked “Queer romantic relationships once they are through are a lot more likely to become friendships than straight romantic relationships because we, as a community, need to support each other.” 

“Alright, then” Hope said, feeling the acid taste of sarcasm building up in the back of her throat “So we are gonna hang out as if we were friends cause we need to support each other and ignore the fact that you got a girlfriend two seconds after we stopped talking?” 

Hope could see Amy swallowing slowly, trying to hold the sudden punch. 

“I don’t see why that has to be a problem” 

Hope laughed ironically and that was the only kind of laughter that came from her that Amy didn’t like. She wished Amy had fought back. 

“We could be friends” Amy insisted “And we could hang out if you want.” 

Hope didn’t reply. She was too aware of how much that would hurt. 

They arrived at George’s house. It was a tiny building with a pizza place right next to the entrance. The smell from mozzarella and tomato drifted through the walls of the apartment. Once they got in, Alan was inside getting everything ready for the guests. He had bought pizza obviously and cut them as theatre masks. Each guest would receive either the drama or comedy face, based on their personality. Molly, George and Hope got drama while Annabelle, Amy and Alan got comedy. Hope ended up sitting right across Amy. When everyone was looking right at whoever was speaking, Hope would catch a glimpse of her while she listened carefully and nodded at anything the speaker would say. Alan had gone on and on about his dilemma of accepting a gogo dancing offer and if that would interfere in his career as a serious actor. George was supportive and told him that Lady Gaga started off by gogo dancing in lower Manhattan. Alan replied that Lady Gaga had to wait several years to shake off that exotic persona and be considered a serious artist. They never reached an agreement. 

They spent the next hour or so drinking cheap vodka and smoking cheap weed Hope had brought from L.A. She was used to alcohol and had to drink a lot in order to get drunk, despite her tiny body. Annabelle was the only one that could play at the same level, but the others were falling like flies. The original plan was to get wasted and go dancing but Alan and George’s place had a tiny balcony that hung from their bedroom and soon they realized that that could be their own dance floor. They barely fit there but the music was good, the sky was clear and the night was perfect. Hope drank enough to loosen herself a bit. That was not the kind of party where she would hide away in the bathroom. She sang at the top of her lungs with Annabelle and they danced holding their hands. It felt like a goodbye. Soon they’d start college and they would drift apart slowly until they’d have to catch up as strangers. Hope saw life in a very nostalgic way and sometimes that blurred how she approached the good times. Other times, she’d use it as material for her short stories and she would change the character’s names. 

They all danced around Alan when Molly put on Telephone. Hope felt the urge to smoke but the balcony was full. Being the only open space in the apartment, she remembered a small window that hung from the kitchen. She left the balcony and stared at the others from inside. Amy was doing a quirky robotic dance with Molley and they kept laughing at the way their bodies awkwardly moved in that tiny space. She went in the kitchen, sat on the counter and lit up a cigarette. The air tinted with pepperoni pizza smell coming from the greasy pizza place from downstairs made its way inside the small place. She inhaled the cigarette air and her lungs filled as if she had taken a breath of solitude. Nostalgia matched amazingly with Marlboro lights. It wasn’t long until Amy walked in. 

“Sorry, I… I didn’t know you were here” she mumbled. 

“Easy, nerd, I don’t bite” 

Amy seemed a bit tipsy, but not drunk. Her face was suddenly serious, changing from the giggly expression she had with Molly outside. Hoped lowkey wished she could make her laugh. 

“Well, you didn’t see this carefree three hours ago” Amy replied. 

Hope smiled. She was right.   
“True” she said “I wasn’t being the best version of myself.” 

“So, which is the best version of yourself?” Amy asked, this time with no mumbling. “The cruel bitch that made my life impossible in high school? The girl who kissed me at Nick’s party? The woman who shared her craziest sex fantasies over the phone? Or the immature coward that lied about living in New York?”

That last one hurt. Amy counted each question with each finger from her right hand and Hope was taken aback by Amy’s sudden wave of confidence and harshness. 

“Wow, you didn’t stutter and those were a lot of rhetorical questions.” 

Amy’s hand was still up in the air. 

“I am all of those,” Hope said as she put out the cigarette and lowered Amy’s fingers with a gentle swipe of her hand. “The thing is I can be a bitch, I can be insecure, I can be bold and I can be honest. You just didn’t have enough time to figure that out.”

They looked at each other for a few minutes without saying much. Amy held Hope’s defiant look and didn’t hesitate. Without even noticing, during the whole time, they were holding hands. All of the sudden, their little bubble was broken by Molly running in the room and throwing up in the kitchen sink. 

“Sorry…” she said slowly while holding on to the kitchen counter as if her life depended on it. “The bathroom has been busy for a while.”

“What’s happening in there?”

“Triple A is throwing up in the sink and Alan is throwing up in the toilet.” 

Amy moved past Hope and grabbed Molly’s hair gently. 

“You still look fab, babe” Amy said encouraging her friend, while she rolled her eyes at Hope. “You okay?”

“This is the best night of my life” Molly whimpered. “All of us, having fun in New York, I never even dreamed this would happen…”

Amy and Hope looked at each other and laughed silently. 

“So… you were saying we didn’t have time to know each other?” 

Hope nodded. 

“We could have time now” Amy hinted. 

Hope smiled. 

“So you wanna be friends with me now?” 

This time, Amy nodded.

She knew she had it in her to snap right back with a sarcastic comment and leave her behind. Probably, in time, that would prove to be the smart decision. But there was something inside her that kept assuring her that if they had run into each other without really planning it after a year, fate had something else in store for them. Molly kept throwing up right next to them and she started drunk crying. 

“Alright, nerd” Hope agreed. “Let’s be friends. But I warn you, I’ll be such a great friend to you that you are never gonna wanna let me go.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> follow me at tw: @emindomita and let me know what you think (:

It particularly hurt when Amy got up and announced she was leaving. She had to drive her girlfriend to the airport. Hope smiled with no teeth, trying to hold back any signs of discomfort. They had been catching up about Botswana for about an hour, sitting on the kitchen floor, while Molly half-slept half-talked nonsense over Amy’s shoulder. The apartment had gone suddenly quiet. George and Alan had fallen asleep on their bed, while Anabelle slept between them like a giant baby. Silence felt sweet and the only things that could be heard were the broken kitchen tap, the tiny drops of water dripping carelessly and the sound of New York traffic outside. Amy went over every detail about Africa. She said she worked her ass off making those tampons. Some days her fingertips would be sore after handling and shaping all that cotton. Three girls who were originally part of her program left after a month. That doubled the work of the brave ones who stayed. Amy pointed this out a few times, making sure Hope noticed she had been considered by the program coordinator as one of the brave ones. She talked on and on about her host family. Hope had heard a few stories about them from back when they still talked everyday and asked each other what they were doing so as not to admit the conversation was nearing the end. Amy’s host parents were both villagers who worked in town. The mother worked as a secretary in one of the town’s local radio and her host-dad was a supervisor at a supermarket. They had a daughter three years younger than Amy called Keeya and a little son, Tapiwa. Both of them had shown Amy around, fixed and lent her a bike and showed her all the fun places she had to see before going back to America. They asked weird questions about her life back home and knew stuff about American pop culture that Amy herself had no idea about such as the names of all the Kardashian babies. They taught her how to cook Matemekwane which were spicy fried dumplings stuffed with vegetables. They specially cooked without any meat for her. Amy had been a vegetarian since she was twelve. They also made her a special porridge called Dikgobe with peas and beans and maize and helped her cook american veggie burgers on Saturdays. They threw a special thanksgiving dinner for her and Amy thanked that night she could experience all that with such a warm welcoming family. Amy told Hope she had learnt only a few words in Tswana but memorized two entire songs to sing after dinner with her host-family. She had travelled to towns which names she couldn’t pronounce and had seen animals without planning it. She met a lot of locals and people travelling from abroad. She said people in Botswana were nice and open and happy. She also said they had to work twice as hard for the regular things. They had a lot of will and a sense of community she hadn’t ever seen. Hope enjoyed seeing that little spark in her eyes, the kind that you only see when a person is talking vividly about an experience that changed their lives. She wondered if she had the same ability to see the world like Amy – full of beautiful new things and filled with that hopeful sense of tomorrow. She wondered if she looked that excited when she talked about Europe or her road trip across America. Amy looked nervous in an insanely cute way every time Hope asked questions and she couldn’t help but notice how her lips frantically moved, her voice became high-pitched and how she spoke twice as fast when remembering something so clearly she just had to mention every single detail about it. An hour talking just slipped away like sand between their fingers. Just like the perfect definition of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. 

“I should get going” Amy sighed as she stood up after a long pause while she caught her breath due to all the talking. “I have to… I promised…”

“Go, it’s getting late” Hope finished the sentence for her, putting Amy out of her agony. 

“Right.” 

Amy woke Molly up. She barely had room in her dorm with Daisy staying with her for that one last night, but she wasn’t gonna leave Molly at George and Alan’s in that state. She helped her stand up, splashed some water on her face and made their way downstairs before getting a cab and losing themselves on New York’s streets. Hope walked silently to the balcony and lit a cigarette as she saw how Amy stopped a taxi on the street and hoped on. She stayed there for a while, gushing in the feeling of seeing Amy again. Hope touched her own lips, trying to remember what it felt like to be kissed by her back then. She got scared at the fact that the memory didn’t quite reach her right away. Maybe she was beginning to forget. 

Hope grabbed Anabelle’s arm and tried to wake her up. She had promised she wouldn’t leave her alone there, stranded. Getting her to walk up the drop down ladder from her room in the attic would be a challenge, but she considered her options. It didn’t seem like waking up between George and Alan alone would be something that she’d enjoy. Her friend opened her eyes quite fast, surprised at the sudden shake. She didn’t seem in that bad shape. Her hair was messy and her eyes red due to all the pot they had smoked, but Hope had seen her worst than that after every party during senior year. They didn’t have enough money to get a cab so they took the subway. At that point of the night, most of it was filled with people either on their way to the second or third club, or the losers who were going back home alone. In spite of Anabelle’s company, Hope felt she belonged to the second group. She wasn’t even going home to anyone. Amy was. That sudden occurrence stung her on the middle of her chest. 

“Cheer up, asshole” Annabelle told her at some point. “We are riding New York’s subway wasted, we are making memories as we speak.” 

Hope laughed at her friend’s comment, trying to remember when was the last time she had seen Anabelle so nostalgic. College had definitely taken a toll on her. When they got off the subway, the sun was already creeping in. The streets were tinted with a golden sunrise beam that made them seem more welcoming. Hope felt glad Anabelle was there. Had she been alone, she would have started crying on her way home. They stopped at a coffee shop that had just opened. The man running it, a middle-aged bald guy with adult acne and a weird beard, was placing retractable metal tables on the sidewalk and pouring fresh coffee from a tiny window. Hope had a cold brew and Annabelle a caramel latte, while they shared a giant donut that left chocolate stains on their fingers and around the corner of their mouths. They ate in silence as the sun rose and it started to get weirdly hot for such an early hour. 

“Did you talk to Amy?” Annabelle finally asked. 

Hope had seen that little desire in her face to ask if anything had happened between the two of them. 

“I told her the truth,” Hope said. “Like I should’ve done in the first place.” 

“You really lost your grip there, dude.” 

“I know. I’m the worst.” 

Annabelle looked at her for a while, as if she was studying her. 

“Why all of the sudden are you so open about this? Like… you never ever mentioned any other girl you liked before.” 

Hope repeated the question in her mind, trying to come up with a witty reply to avoid answering. But she was too tired to even try. 

“I don’t know, dude, I just… I don’t now. Amy’s weird.” 

“Why?” 

“She just is…”

“Welp, it’s painfully funny that after school, you now have a crush on her and she’s with someone else.” 

Hope laughed bitterly at how the tables had turned, while she played with her fingers and stared at the floor. She could’ve explained how Amy had caught her attention a long time ago, but wasn’t in the mood to go into the specifics of her apparent sudden infatuation. Annabelle kept looking at her as if she needed an answer to stop doubting whether all of it was true after all. Hope knew she didn’t need to give her one though. 

“It’s just strange how after all that time you ended up noticing her.” 

The sun was full out now, and the first commuters heading downtown were flooding the little window where the coffee guy was standing with less hands than needed. A few older couples, early birds and joggers coming from Central Park started sitting on the other retractable tables next to them. Hope looked up north. A few blocks up, Columbia University stood in solitude. 

“I think that she was the one who noticed me.” 

***  
Hope woke up with Anabelle’s sleepy breath on her face. Her friend was passed out on the bed, with arms and legs spread comically all over the mattress. The bad part about the attic was that as soon as the sun was up, it would come right through the skylight and burn her eyes even when shut. The good part about the attic was that a Paris Hilton party might be happening downstairs but no one would hear a thing. That’s why when Gina left for Mick’s parents upstate, Hope was completely asleep and didn’t notice at all. She picked up her phone and opened Instagram. Anabelle’s stories were first. One pic of Hope taken from behind while they were walking to George’s. One blurry video of all of them dancing on the balcony. Hope could spot Amy’s red hair flying around in the back. Another picture of New York buildings and finally one quick snap of Hope drinking coffee, her lips and nose stained with chocolate. She went to her searching history. Amy’s profile was there first. She had silenced her stories and posts to avoid seeing her pics with Daisy, but she couldn’t kid herself. She would do the same each time: tap on the little magnifying glass and type down @theredpandamy and wait so that the little circle around her profile pic would turn dark pink. She had uploaded a pic with Molly and the drag queen from the theatre’s entrance and a picture with Daisy at the airport. They were hugging and she had put a heart emoji between the two of them. Hope closed it and blocked the phone. She felt Annabelle spreading her arms open and moving her head in her direction. 

“The bad morning breath does not go away, no matter how fancy your Ivy league college is” Hope said without moving her eyes from the ceiling. 

“Shut up, you are not my ideal person to be waking up with either.” 

They lied there in silence, looking at their phones. Hope checked Twitter. 

“@nothope28: feeling like not leaving my bed at all or getting a haircut. those are not exclusive.”

Send tweet. Ten seconds went by. 

“You are fucking crazy if you think we are staying here all day” Annabelle whispered taking her phone off her hands. 

“Don’t be a dick” Hope said, climbing on top of her and trying to reach her hand. “Give it back.” 

“Soooo many girls wish they were me right now” she joked. 

Hope chuckled and reached it after struggling. 

“Asshole.” 

She sat on the bed. 

“Why would you do that?” 

“Well, I got what I wanted - you are not lying down anymore.” 

“Smart sneaky bitch.” 

They both sat on the mattress, facing each other. 

“I am hungry,” Annabelle groaned. “Let’s go brunch, what time is it?” 

“Great idea, are you planning on wearing last night’s vomited clothes?” 

Annabelle just had the dress she had worn the previous night, which she had ruined with beer and puke. Hope realized she had no clothes, no toothbrush, no nothing. All she had was her phone, her purse and some weed left. 

“Or… we can go pick up my things? Molly has them in her car.”

“And where is her car?”

“At Amy’s.” Annabelle said with her lips shrinking. Hope rolled her eyes. “We parked the car there. She knew she’d end up crashing on Amy’s couch and I knew you were close to Columbia so we figured it was the best place. Come ooooon.”

Hope laid again on the bed with her arms open, looking at the skylight. Was she going to be that person? The one that desperately wants to avoid the girl who had moved on without her? That was not like her. Amy seemed happy with her girlfriend. Thay had definitely moved past the awkward phase of getting to know each other and shared a complicity that was palpable. She would not interfere. She would be her friend, if that was possible somehow. And in the meantime, she would try to figure out how to stop feeling sorry for herself even though she was great at auto sabotaging her own chances. 

“Well, text them and tell them you need your things.” Hope said trying to minimize the implications of going. “I’m gonna take a shower.” 

“Right, I’ll go after you. Can you lend me some clothes?” 

They got ready within forty minutes. Hope was done first, after grabbing her fringe jacket and putting some baggy jean shorts with a huge vintage belt that she had rescued from her mother’s garage sale boxes. Her converse were dirty and worn out, but she couldn't bring herself to throw them out. She had walked a lot of streets with them. She even managed to eat an entire bowl of cereal with some oatmeal before Annabelle was ready. They hit the street past noon. Molly had said that Amy and her were barely woken up and that they had plans to go on a tour to the UN headquarters that evening — a plan that both Hope and Annabelle both found nerdy, dull and not interesting at all. They resolved to go to Amy’s, pick Annabelle’s things and go back home so that she could put her own clothes. Hope’s pants were too long for her. Then, they’d probably end up grabbing something to eat. Hope wanted to see Washington Square Park and the Bowery, so they were thinking about walking around there until they figured out what to do next. 

They arrived at the Columbia area and walked towards Carman Hall. Hope lit a cigarette while they waited. Annabelle frowned at the image of her friend, smoking with almost an empty stomach. Truth is Hope had never been a heavy smoker, but as her loneliness accentuated the year before, she had begun to smoke more. She liked to roll her own cigarettes and smell the fresh scent of organic sun-dried tobacco but as the vice grew she became more anxious and lazy and the art of making her own simply became tedious. Molly and Amy went down, all prepped and ready to go. Amy was wearing one of her beaded necklaces and a Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign t-shirt. Annabelle ran up to Molly and gave her a hug as she grabbed her bag with all her things inside. 

“Thank you thank you thank you thank you” she said as she kissed her all over her face. “This asshole’s clothes are so long and tight I feel like I’m wearing a giant baby’s clothes.” 

Hope smiled at the silly remark while she looked at the floor and put out her cigarette. 

“So what plans do you have for today?” Molly asked. 

“Dunno” Annabelle replied. “Hope wants to go see the Bowery and some vintage second-hand clothes places there. We might get something to eat on the way. You?”

“Oh, we want to check out this Eleanor Roosevelt exhibition at the UN” Amy said with the biggest eyes of excitement. 

Hope couldn’t believe how adorably dorky she was. 

“I bet it’s a hit” Hope commented sarcastically. 

Amy didn’t notice the tone and proceeded: 

“Yeah, it’s so interesting, the letters she wrote to Lorena Hickock are on display. They announced the exhibit for pride month and these are the last couple of days left before they take the whole thing to Boston. And then there’s an interactive part with all her columns and her books and even her speeches at the UN assembly and... ”

Hope smiled at noticing how fast she was going and how her voice was becoming more and more high pitched and serious. 

“Oh, you were joking.” Amy realized. 

“No, not at all, I think it’s interesting” the other one replied frankly. 

They both went quiet. 

“Well…” Molly smirked. “We should get going, Ames.”

“Yeah, so do we.” 

Once again, they went quiet. 

“Hey, why don’t we do something together tonight? Would that be too weird?” Molly brought up the question to the four of them, but she looked at Amy and Hope, trying to see if that would be uncomfortable. 

“I mean, that sounds like a great idea,” Amy said. “If you want to.” 

“Yeah, sure.” Hope added. “My cousin is out of town tonight if you guys wanna come over for dinner or something.” 

“Dinner? As in grown ups?” Molly squaked. “Fuck no, we are going out tonight.” 

Annabelle let out a laugh. 

“Molly, what the hell?” 

“Hell yes, I am starting my sophomore year in college in three weeks, I am not staying in two nights in a row in New York.” 

Hope wondered why Molly had to be over the top all the time. Seriously, like, why? 

“You can do better than that, Hope” Molly teased “Come on, what’s the best place we can go?”

“How would I know?” she said. “I just moved here.” 

“I am sure there’s a place for people who look like supermodels like yourself and her friends.” she suggested. “Not that I don’t look like a supermodel but…”

Hope dug in her brain. She remembered this group of guys she met when she spent a few days in Boulder. She scratched the bottom of her brain, she had barely paid attention to them. They were a group of friends, yes, she remembered. A group of friends, some of them were from New Jersey, the others were from New York. Yes, that was it. They lived in New York, they had a band which sounded awful and two of them worked at that bar with a name that sounded like a cliché. What was it? The Wilde Guys? The Crazy Guys? Too lame. No, that was it, the Wilde Children! 

“Fine, whatever.” Hope said, giving up. “A friend of a friend works at this trashy bar in Alphabet City. It’s called the Wilde Children.”

“And what do they do there?” Amy asked. 

“Nothing, they just play music.” 

Molly doubted. 

“Okay, we’ll see you there.” 

“Awesome, nerd.” Hope said. “Have fun at the Roosevelt thing.” 

Molly and Amy got lost down the subway and Hope and Annabelle walked to Hope’s, Annabelle changed and they left the house again. Annabelle wanted to try out this restaurant near the High Line called The Wild Son, coincidentally. Both of them were starving, so they ordered hamburgers and iced tea and just sat on the chairs that were organized on the sidewalk, basking in the past-noon sun. They talked about how New York was both scary and awesome and how they pretended to know what they were doing when they actually didn’t. They walked down to the Bowery, just like Hope had wanted. She had no money to buy anything but they went in several second-hand stores, touched the fabrics and looked at the stupid colours the old vintage clothes had. She bought a Karl Kani bucket hat that honestly looked great on her before continuing their expedition west. As they moved closer to Washington Square Park and NYU territory, Hope grew more anxious. She had dreamt most of her childhood and teenage years with a life in that city, imagining every detail of it and how it would feel to finally be there. After her parents got divorce and his dad moved away, her mom had told her that she could do anything she aspired to. She could do anything or be anyone. But as economic struggles became more inexorable, she started doubting if that promised future of success and stories of overcoming were really destined for her. When she saw the first purple sign with the little flame hanging from a near wall, she realized she had made a mistake in ever doubting herself. And from then on, she promised she would never do that again. 

Annabelle and her took out an old cloth they had found in one the open boxes at Gina’s attic, put it on the green grass and lied there under the shade of a tree. Pedestrians walked around and you could hear the sound of the running water of a nearby fountain. Some dude with a cello was playing a piece further down, closer to the Arch, as some people gathered round and listened. Annabelle napped for a bit and Hope took out a book, one of the very few she had brought from home. She had started reading it on the bus ride on her way to New York and was so caught up in the story she easily could have finished it right away. But it was so well-written and all the details were spilled in a way that tension would build perfectly, as if it was part of a choreography of words and sentences, that she controlled herself and decided she’d enjoy every page of it without rushing it. She reached her daily twenty page limit and woke Annabelle up. They got up as the day was nearing dusk and hopped on the subway to go back home. 

“So how did you meet this person from the bar?” Annabelle asked while they were making a quick dinner.

“I met him in Boulder during the trip.” she mentioned. “They kept talking about their stupid band and whatever. Honestly, I don't think he’ll remember me.” 

“Funny, I thought you had slept with him or something?” 

Hope laughed at the idea. 

“Why would you think that?”

“I don’t know, it might have added a bit of tension to our night with Amy and Molly, don’t you think?”

Hope evaluated the idea for a bit. 

“Nah, I don’t think Amy cares.” 

“Why don’t you flirt with him and see what happens?” 

“Why would I do that?” 

Annabelle talked as if she was approaching a social experiment: 

“Well, first: you could end up having sex tonight. Second: you could see if Amy cares.” 

She was frying some eggs on a pan as she talked and looked directly at the food being cooked. 

“I’m a lesbian, A. I don’t like men. I am not a huge fan of dicks flying around, you know?” 

Annabelle rolled her eyes. 

“Then, what are we gonna do tonight?”

“What we do every night we go together: dance, get drunk, get high and cry in the bathroom. Not necessarily in that order.” 

By the time they left the house, the two of them were already a bit light-headed. They drank one of Mick’s six-pack of Blue Moon and Hope wrote a note on her phone to remember to buy another one before they got back to the city. The bar was far south in Manhattan but the night was so deliciously nice and New York Saturday nights had such an addictive vibe to them that Annabelle and Hope decided they would walk a few blocks before finally hopping on the subway. They wallowed in the city’s addictive rush and the stranger’s faces as they made their way, hand in hand, down Columbus Avenue before doing a detour and taking Central Park West. Eventually they returned to Broadway and jumped on the 2 train to go downtown and take the L train to go East. Their expedition took them a little longer, while the effect of the beers faded away, and Molly and Amy were already waiting for them on the corner of Avenue A and 13th street. 

“Where the fuck were you?” Molly squealed as she saw them. 

“Easy, tiger” Annabelle calmed her down. “We're here, aren’t we?” 

“Yeah, twenty minutes late”

“Chillax.” 

Hope took a look at Amy while she stood with her eyes up, looking at the building they were about to enter. She had a little highlighter glow on her cheeks that accentuated the freckles and the pink of her cheeks. She also had lip balm on her lips and it made them look brighter and juicer. She had her mouth in a pout, the kind that she made when she was slightly concerned about something. 

They waited by the line the people were doing outside, while Hope texted the guy she knew. She had already casually replied to one of his stories that afternoon and let him know that she and a couple of friends might be going. He said she should tell him when they were close to the bar and that he’d make them go in avoiding the exasperating long queuing. 

“Do you guys want a bit?” Annabelle offered a half started joint she had rolled when they got off the subway. 

Both Molly and Amy denied shaking their head. 

“Come on, Ames.” Annabelle insisted. 

She stepped closer to her and extended her arm with the lit blunt in her fingers. 

“ I don’t smoke weed. It makes me…” 

“...it makes her nostalgic and miss her mom.” Hope said, lifting her eyes and giving a warning look to her friend. 

Annabelle laughed, but the sound diminished as she realized that Hope was dead serious. 

“Leave the girl alone, A.” she said while she blocked her phone. “Okay, so T.A is on his way. He’ll let us in.” 

“How do you know this person?” Amy asked. “Can we trust him?” 

“Easy, nerd” Hope tried to calm her down. “I spent three hours in a car ride with him and his two other friends and he is harmless. If there was a chance to go serial killer on me, that was it.” 

“Yeah, this just proves he’s nicer than average.” Annabelle continued. “I just hope there’s good music in here.”

“It’s the kind that I like.” Hope warned her. 

“Then we are screwed.” 

A tall guy with a beanie and a coconut earring walked towards them. He seemed a little bit older but not much. He waved at Hope from afar. 

“Hey, long time no see” he greeted her. 

He had a wide smile and nervous eyes. 

“So these are the friends… hey” he continued. “I’ll let you guys come with me and I’ll give you each a free drink pass if you want. If there are other substances that you wanna try out my boy Nick, the tall blonde guy with a nose septum on the bar at the right will help you out. Band plays at midnight and then we have music until around four. The party usually continues at my place if you wanna join as well.” 

He spoke kinda fast, as if he was advertising the whole thing to a bunch of strangers. They really were, but he fixed his eyes on Hope. All of them noticed, even herself. None of them said anything. 

“Alright, we ready to go?” 

They nodded and followed him down the entrance, avoiding the line and walking down a small dark hallway. When he opened the second door, a full dancefloor with a small stage at the back and two bars at the sides appeared in front of them. The place was packed and you could already smell the sweat coming off from the dancing bodies. As soon as they got in, their sight was considerably worse and all the dark light shone on them, exacerbating their faces’ angles and the bright colours of their jewellery. 

“Okay” Annablle shouted at them so that they could hear. “I want no whining. We are doing shots, the four of us, cause there is no way I can put up more than an hour of this stinky place sober.” 

Molly said yes without doubting and Hope laughed out loud. Amy looked worried, but followed them to the bar. Hope got it. Amy had been in Africa for the past year. Molly was ahead of her in terms of heavy drinking and substance abuse after spending freshman year at Yale with Annabelle. She was clearly not as loose as Hope would’ve been, but it was Molly Davidson. Baby steps. Amy, on the other hand, was experiencing this for the first time and Hope felt an irreplaceable need to take care of her. They arrived at the bar and recognized Nick, A.T’s friend, who also saw Hope and remembered her right away. He approached them. 

“Hey, supermodel. So you finally came round looking for me, huh?” 

Hope rolled her eyes at him. 

“That’s real sweet but I don’t do basic guys.” she joked. 

He laughed, hiding his shattered ego. 

“So what kind of guys do you do?” 

Hope leaned over the bar and approached his ear. 

“I don’t do guys, I do girls.” She smoothly removed herself. “Can you pour us some tequila shots?” 

“Yeah, sure. This round is on me.” 

He quickly took four small glasses and filled them with cheap tequila. Molly and Annabelle were oblivious of the whole thing. They had been dancing. But Amy looked at the whole situation. 

“What did you say to get us free drinks?” she asked in her year. “He seemed like he was hitting on you.” 

Her eyes looked naive. 

“I just told him I’m out of his league.” 

They took the glasses to their friends with the salt and the lemon. 

“Alright, I have an idea,” Annabelle said. “Let’s do the round.”

“What round?” 

“We’ll all put some salt on our neck, like...here, right below our right ear. And each of us has to lick the salt from the person on their right.” 

Amy looked nervously. Molly was on her right. Hope was on her left. 

“No” Hope said. “Come on, that’s a silly game.” 

Molly gave little jumps in her place. 

“No, no, I wanna play, come oooon.” 

Hope looked at Amy who seemed nervous and awkward. She asked her for her permission with a look and the other one knew exactly what her eyes were trying to say. She shrugged. 

“Alright,” Annabelle said. “Let’s do this.” 

The four of them poured the salt on their neck. Hope leaned over Amy’s and removed her red hair so that her skin would be uncovered. She took a deep breath and pressed her slightly open mouth over the little bump of salt, using only her lips and avoiding the awkward tongue situation. Her lips were moist enough with the lipstick to collect all the salt from the area and leave no traces behind. Her skin just felt salty and tense and smooth. She couldn’t see anything in the dark. She wondered if Amy had freckles on her shoulders or her chest. She tried to shake off the thought as she withdrew her mouth, chugged the tequila and bit the lemon with her teeth. The sour taste not only served as a chaser to the tequila and the end of the ritual but also as a strong distraction from what had just happened. 

“Alright, let’s go dance” Molly said and took Annabelle by the hand. 

Hope looked at Amy with an awkward look. 

“That was weird,” she said. “Sorry.” 

“No, no… that was… uhm, fine. It was fine, really.” she said. 

“How was the Eleanor Roosevelt thing?” Hope pumped as she leant over her shoulder to ask the question. She was just trying to take her mind away from the tricky situation they had just been brought into. 

Amy’s face lit up immediately at the question. 

“It was so much fun, honestly, I am glad we got to see it.” 

They both had to talk very close to each other’s year cause the place was noisy and a mess. 

“What was the best thing about it?” 

“Well, for starters, they had the original letters she wrote to Hickock and there were hand-written notes of some of the UN conferences she had been to. There were also tapes of her and radio recordings where she spoke about a lot of interesting things.” 

“That sounds super interesting.” 

Hope just relished in Amy's fast words and the way she kept talking about things that mattered to her. 

“You should go check it out.” 

“Alright,” Hope said. “Maybe I will. But it’s not really my thing.” 

They both stood there, looking at each other. The band had just gone onstage and they were beginning to tune in their guitars. The music stopped and an awkward silence where you could only hear people’s small talking came into place. 

“Then, what is your thing?” Amy asked. 

A song started to play. It was a cover of The Strokes. Hope recognized the song right away. Amy didn’t. 

“I don't know.” Hope shouted out as the music began. “For now, let’s just dance!” 

“What?!?!” 

Amy couldn’t hear a thing. 

“Just dance!!!” 

Hope grabbed Amy by the hand and took her to the middle of the dancefloor. They had lost Annabelle and Molly but it didn’t really matter. Hope started jumping up and down in very small jumps to go with the song’s rhythm as the red haired singer ran all over the stage. Amy and Hope finally let go and let themselves get lost in the music, hand in hand. 

***

The sky had that shade of violet that announced it would soon be tomorrow. Molly and Amy had crossed the street to buy something to eat for the four of them. Annabelle was squating between a trash can and a tree in a corner of Tompkins Square Park. Hope covered her while she peed. She lit up a cigarette and took out her phone. Then, she googled “UN headquarters Roosevelt exhibit” and tapped on the link. She bought a ticket for the following Monday.


	4. Chapter 4

**_HOPE_ **   
_Hey, nerd_   
_Exhibit was pretty great._   
_Thxs for the rec._

Amy stood up as soon as she read the three messages, all at once. She had been lying on her bed for the past thirty minutes after facetiming with Molly who had left the day before. She looked at Hope’s messages on her phone screen. All of them arrived like a burst, as if the other person was just casually texting. She remembered when Hope and her would text every day. Her palms would sweat most of the time and she would type and delete the messages several times before hitting send. It never took too much time for Hope to reply. She always responded right away, with short messages, no place for doubt. She had said several times she liked her, that she wanted to see her. She never made her doubt. Amy was thankful for that, even though she never told her so. But as time went by and Hope never came to visit, Amy thought she was beginning to lose interest. She never built up the courage to ask why. Why she had changed the way she talked, the things she told her. Maybe she had met someone else. Amy never found out. As Hope’s aloofness became clearer and the ocean between them turned more palpable, colder, the physical barrier that it really was, she started to realize the truth of their relationship. They had made out at a party, drunk and she had messed it up. And after that, Hope had just been polite and nice. She probably was confused. Finishing high school was troubling for some people, herself included. As Hope had put it, she wasn’t sure if she could go to NYC, figure things out on her own. She had confessed to Amy she acted all tough and as if she didn’t care, but the truth was that she was tremendously scared of becoming an adult on the other side of the country all alone. She even suggested she might not go to school at all and stay with her mother in California but also admitted that living in New York had been a dream of hers since she was a kid. Amy felt that Hope was insecure in her own mind, even though that in the little time they had talked consistently, she discovered that Hope was insanely witty, that she mastered sarcasm and that she was kind and gentle within her honesty.

Hope hadn’t told Amy much about her family. Amy just knew that her brothers had moved outside of California and had their own families. She also knew that they had taken their father's side during their divorce. Hope stayed with her mother when his father also moved out of town. Amy noticed immediately that Hope had a really strong connection with her mom. She never asked what had happened and Hope never went into the specifics of any of these. She just mentioned her mother from time to time. Growing up as an only child in a relatively stable family, his father had had a few ups and downs with depression when he was fired from his job, but other than that, Amy’s family had no major difficulties. She had never been good at figuring out how to ask about family dramas or things related to that. Even Molly’s dad had abandoned her and her mother before she finished kindergarten and Amy never asked her friend about it. All the stuff she knew was because Molly had opened up to her. She was a good listener. She listened and tried to use common sense to make others feel better, but it was not her strong suit to advise on personal relationships. She could barely handle her own. She had always been able to wear someone else’s shoes and found that empathy was actually a gift to have healthy relationships. But the awkwardness and her own lack of experience sometimes limited her confidence in giving advice.

_**AMY** _   
_Glad you checked it out!_   
_Miss Annabelle already?_

It only took like five minutes for Hope to answer.

**_HOPE_ **   
_Yes._   
_Don’t tell her I said that._   
_How’s life without the wife?_

AMY  
It’s weird to see her so little.  
I guess I’ll stop thinking that much about it once school begins.

**_HOPE_ **   
_Yup, well, we still have almost three weeks to go._   
_Let me know if you wanna hang out some other time._   
_The exhibit was fun but I feel like I missed out a lot of important details going without you._

Amy read that last message and instantly imagined how nice it would be to go with Hope to some nerdy museum exhibit and talk to her about things. She was too aware that she sounded like a loser when she did that, but Hope seemed to be patient with her and enjoyed the way she talked, even though her voice became an unbearable shriek when she talked too much in very little time.

**_AMY_ **   
_That’d be great!_   
_I’m going to Madison on Friday but we can meet up after._

The instant thought of Daisy came to Amy’s mind as she put the phone down and wondered if she’d ever feel in Daisy’s arms the thrill she felt when Hope had kissed her. The excitement of doing what was not expected to be done. Don’t get her wrong – Daisy was perfect for her. She was always in a good mood, always bright, always challenging. Amy sometimes felt like they were perfect for each other. They had tons of things in common and loved being nerds in their own little cute way. They both supported Hillary in 2016, both had been subscribed to Emma Watson’s One Shared Shelf, both had done model UN and, more importantly, both of them had gone to Botswana to make tampons and save women’s lives. But sometimes, she just pondered, if the comfort she felt while being with Daisy was her own way of settling down for the safe option instead of taking the risk of knowing what would’ve happened had Hope pushed a little bit harder. Daisy had become increasingly important in her life and sometimes she thought that had Daisy not come into the picture, she wouldn’t have lasted that long in Africa. She was like a less-demanding queer version of Molly that included touching, kissing and all that stuff. “Would being with Hope feel different?” she asked herself. She felt like she had missed the opportunity. Playing safe was also a good option to Amy’s eyes. You can never have too much comfort.

**_HOPE_ **   
_Cool, let me know._   
_Enjoy Madison._   
_See ya, nerd._

  
***

Hope put the phone down and lied down on her bed. The smell of roasted veggies was drifting into her room as Gina and Mick were preparing dinner for the family. They had come back from out of town on Sunday, right after Molly had picked up Annabelle from Hope’s and both of them had left for New Haven. Since then, Hope had barely left her attic. She only left her room to greet Florence when the family arrived. On Monday, she went down to make herself breakfast once everyone else had already left. She climbed back up to her bedroom, opened the skylight and inhaled the fresh New York air. The skin on her shoulders tickled at the strength of the beaming. She had sunburnt herself a bit there and on her cheeks, after spending most of Sunday afternoon in Coney Island with Annabelle, lying on the sand. She had thought of Amy all day, wondering what her and Molly were up and why the four of them hadn’t planned to do something together. Her chest throbbed at the idea of her going to Madison to spend time with Daisy, but she was her girlfriend after all, and Hope was barely a friend. She hadn’t stopped thinking about Saturday night and how she had touched Amy’s bare skin with her own lips. How Amy trembled after the nudge and how Hope was almost certainly sure that she could hear the rush of her own blood speeding up. Amidst all the smoke and the confusion, Amy’s hair smelled like coconut and cigarette and their contact was like a breath of winter breeze in that stinky nightclub.

The next couple of days went by as if not much was supposed to happen. Hope was disappointed that New York didn’t feel as grandiose as she thought but she blamed it on the lack of company. She found pleasure on the little things of her new routine. Picking up Florence from kindergarten, walking with her across Morningside Park at the south and playing with her I Spy with an Eye on their way back home. She’d start cooking dinner before Gina got home from the gym which she had signed up again after Hope promised to help her so that she could have a little more time to herself. When Gina got back from work, they’d chat over the kitchen counter while Florence watched TV or played with her toys. After that, Hope would climb up to her room until dinner was ready, read some of the books she had brought from home, write the short poems that she had recently started putting together or call her mother. Dinner would go by smoothly, with small conversation about the day. Mick would monopolize the talking, saying how some of his work colleagues were ruthless and how some of them weren’t. She’d help do the dishes or go put Florence to sleep, after telling her love stories or fairy tales that involved dragons, warrior princesses and absurd stupid knights that often entangled the princesse’s plans. Florence would listen to her with amazed eyes and would often laugh at Hope’s silly jokes and dumb efforts to be funny for a three-year-old.

Her little everyday drill got her mind away from the fact that she was feeling a bit lonely and when the weekend arrived, the thought of Amy being with her girlfriend only bothered her in-between her plans of jogging around Central Park, reading her newly acquired pile of books and her occasionals strolls in the West Village. She had ended up having coffee and listening to poetry slams at the Bowery Poetry Club where spoken word poetry got her attention. She wished she was compelling enough to do that, but her poetry was bad and her onstage presence would not be everlasting. Instead, she sat there, listened to people and took the subway back home before Florence left school. George and Alan had texted her to meet up, but she made an excuse to postpone it for the following week. She didn’t want to meet with them. Her life was not riveting enough to bring anything interesting to their startling conversations about the bright future that was awaiting them and how their current plans were preparing them for that unshakeable fate.

**_AMY_ **   
_You played tennis right?_

It was Sunday again and a week had gone by since Annabelle’s departure. Hope’s phone screen lit up as she was beginning to fall asleep. She read Amy’s text and unblocked it.

**_HOPE_ **   
_You stalker_   
_Lol_   
_Yeah, why_

  
**_AMY_ **   
_The New York Historical Society has a great Billie Jean King archive._   
_Thought you might be interested._

**_HOPE_ **   
_Wow, didn’t know._   
_Should be fun to visit._   
_Are you planning on going?_

  
**_AMY_ **   
_I’m bad at all sports but I’m also gay so BJK is like a god to me._   
_So yeah, I am planning on going tomorrow._

**_HOPE_ **   
_Cool._   
_Let me know if it’s good._

**_AMY_ **   
_Maybe we could go together, no?_   
_Would that be too weird?_

**_HOPE_ **   
_Nah, I don’t think so._

They arranged to meet the following day on the steps of New York’s Historical Society. Amy arrived five minutes late. She was still trying to figure out the New York subway, so she got off one station before needed and had to walk a few blocks down Central Park West to reach the building. The giant building stood overwhelming and impersonal in the middle of the street, with cold walls and window pains that seemed endless. When Amy got nearer, she noticed Hope from behind, wearing her unmistakable fringe jacket and high waisted baggy jeans, standing on the steps, taller than she remembered.

“Hi” she said timidly, with her trademark side smile.

“Hey, nerd” Hope waved at her after turning towards her, her cheeks glowing pink and her lips lit up.

“I recognized your jacket,” Amy admitted.

Hope looked at her own outfit while half-lifting her arms.

“Oh, this? Yeah, it’s like I had it tattooed on me, isn’t it?” Amy grinned at Hope’s comment. “It was my mom’s.”

“Yeah, I always wondered what it was about. Has a lot of personality.”

“Like you, no?” Hope lifted one eyebrow, amused. “Anyway, let’s do this.”

They walked up to the entrance and came into the building, marvelled at the tall ceilings and the entrance hall lit up with the August afternoon sun. They walked up the first floor and followed the instructions to reach the wing with the Billie Jean King archive.

“How is it that you knew that I played tennis?” Hope asked.

“Summer 2012. The public courts near Belvedere” Amy remembered out loud. “You beat my cousin, three years older than us, and he bashed his racket because a girl had outdone him. I hated my cousin back then. I still don’t like him that much but at the time he was just a bully.”

Amy remembered the scene quite vividly. His cousin striking the racket against the hard blue court, little bits of graphite flying all over from his crushed Prince.

“You freak.” Hope laughed. “I don’t even remember that. Your cousin went to Crockett right?”

“Yeah, he’s a jerk.”

“Sounds like it.”

“Anyways, I went to school the next Monday and there you were, like nothing had happened.”

“Well, nothing had really happened…”

Hope laughed at Amy’s astonishment. She was smiling as well.

“It was amazing!” Amy roared. “But you were a bitch to me so it kind of lost its meaning right away.”

Hope’s laugh lowered a bit.

“Yeah, I was mean to you.” she admitted. “I’m sorry. I know it won’t erase all the shitty nasty things I said to you during elementary and high school but I am sorry.”

They turned left in one of the hallways, still trying to find their way to the salon where the exhibit was being displayed. The floors looked impeccable and people walked past them, with their eyes fixated on their little brochures and the name’s of each room, looking for their right one.

“I never understood… why.” Amy said, searching with her inquisitive but naive tone for an answer.

“Well, it’s a classic case of picking at the person you like, don’t you think?”

Hope’s words had no second intentions to them, they contained just pure honesty.

“I liked you,” she repeated. “Like, I didn’t know it back then, but I guess my gaydar developed early and I sort of sensed we might have been alike.”

“So your precocious gaydar is to blame?” Amy asked. “I don’t buy it. When put to good use, it’s supposed to work as a bond enabler, not as a division.”

Hope smiled at the weird comment. It sounded just like Amy.

“Well, picture a thirteen-year-old finally understanding that the reason why she liked Natalie Portman in Star Wars was because she wanted to do her, not be her.” Hope explained.

It was true. For a thirteen year old like Hope, with two older brothers, coming from a catholic family and all, it was complicated to understand that she actually liked girls. Like, a lot.

“I had a weird rage within me and I sort of paid it with you who, somehow, ended up being the classmate that probably felt the most like me and actually wasn’t afraid to admit her own truth.”

Amy felt her cheeks turning red at the comment. This didn’t go unnoticed to Hope’s eyes. She realized Amy was half embarrassed, half flattered.

“If you put it like that, you make it sound like it was a big deal when I came out.”

“It was” the other one admitted. “You were always a force to be reckoned with. You just didn’t know that.”

Amy was the one who made the right call to turn left in the correct aisle and they found themselves in the room they had been looking for for the past twenty minutes. Turns out, and neither of them knew, that the museum had a whole collection of Women’s history and Billie Jean’s was in the middle of it. They sauntered through the room, looking at the objects. Hope pointed out at the wooden rackets. She mentioned which Grand Slams Billie Jean King had won and described her killer right hand hit, her swift and accurate one-handed backhand and the speed of her legs at the net. Amy had no idea about tennis, but she felt as if she had played it her whole life just by listening to Hope’s convincing explanation of how it’s supposed to be done. Hope didn’t shy away from mocking the way tennis players often hit the ball and bothered to explain timely the differences between a backhand with one or two arms. Amy just watched her and chuckled at the surreal image of watching the coolest hottest girl from high school attempt to make her laugh. Hope had such a particular way of being funny, it was like she wasn’t even trying to do so, but inexplicably her reluctance to exercise comedy just seemed exhilarating in an unconscious way.

They moved on to the next exhibit and they soon had finished an entire wing of the museum. The afternoon went by insanely fast between strolls in different areas and getting surprised at what they might encounter in the next. Hope had never seen history that way, as an alive expression of the past, and Amy’s company made it all the more enjoyable. Her ability to still startle even though she probably already knew most of the things they were discovering was a magnet to everyone around her. Hope fell bewitched with her presence and they way she made the least interesting thing look like something astonishing. When Hope glanced at her phone, she realized it was about time for her to make her way back uptown to pick up Florence from school. Amy, surprised at the fact that Hope’s niece went to school near Morningside Park, offered to go with her to pick her up, since it was on her way to Carnan Hall. They both went into the subway together, talking about the beginning of the semester in just two weeks. Both of them were nervous and too aware of the fact that they’d be among the older students in their classes.

“What will you do once semester starts?” Hope asked. “Are you joining a protest group or something?”

Her question was half joke, half serious. They had been talking about whether they wanted to have an active social life in school or not. Hope wasn’t sure and Amy had gone on and on about how Columbia had multiple social clubs that she was interested in.

“Well, there’s this group called LUCHA which means…”

“Fight.” Hope finished for her. “My mom’s Puerto Rican, I know Spanish.”

“Wah, I didn’t know.” Amy was surprised. “But yeah, I heard great things about it. And a lot of their members have gone on to work with AOC or like Tammy Baldwin. Imagine how great it would be if I could do that.”

“Well, if part of the application requirements is to be a preachy pain in the ass Jane Fonda apprentice, you are good.”

Amy laughed nervously at the comment, not knowing if it was a bitter observation or a sarcastic comment. Knowing Hope, she inclined for the latter. Their ride on the subway was about to come to an end and they’d soon arrive at Florence’s school.

“But I am slightly concerned that they won’t let me in”

“Why?”

“They take their oral skills very seriously,” Amy explained. “A big part of their success relies on their public speeches and the socratic approach to debate. I am not compelling enough or like… have stage presence. It’s like I’m aiming for an Obama and I am a Melania, if you know what I mean. I mean, I am like… very bad at talking in public.”

“Well, I find you extremely captivating… I mean, when you talk about… things that interest you” Hope blushed at the sudden confusion and how her feelings had betrayed her. She had been acting cool and easy all afternoon to fuck it up at the end. “What I am trying to say is that you should channel that energy, you know. I wish I could help but I sort of feel the same way. I like spoken poetry and I can’t bring myself to even read my own poetry out loud.”

They had just got off the subway and were walking past 113th street and the Morningside playground.

“Then I have an idea” Amy said, as if a lightbulb had just lit up right above her head like it was an eureka moment. “Why don’t you practice with me… your poetry and I practice with you. I’ve been doing oratory exercises all summer but I feel like I could use an audience, you know?”

Hope thought about for a split second. The idea of reciting her poems to Amy was her own personal nightmare, but at the same time she didn’t want to forfeit the possibility of having an excuse to meet with her at least on a weekly basis. Her lack of response made Amy frown, as if she was trying to grasp why her answer was stalling.

“Sure, nerd, why not.” Hope agreed. “Today for you, tomorrow for me.”

Hope and Amy stood at the kindergarten door, as the kids were running towards their parents. Little Florence appeared in the middle of the last group, with her blond curly hair standing out from most of her schoolmates. As soon as she saw Hope, she ran towards her with the biggest smile on her face. She jumped to her arms and Hope lifted her up in the air and kissed her.

“Look Flo” Hope told her. “This is my friend Amy.”


End file.
